Lawyer and deputy who won women’s suffrage in the Constituent Cortes of 1931
In the Constituent Cortes debate of 1 October 1931 she prevailed over Victoria Kent and carried Article 36, granting women the vote, by 161 votes to 121.
A lawyer, writer and politician born to a seamstress in Madrid, who lost her father at ten and studied while working. In 1925 she became the second woman in the Madrid Bar. Elected to the Constituent Cortes for the Radical Party in 1931, she helped draft the constitution and on 1 October won women’s suffrage. She was closely involved in drafting the 1932 divorce law and argued for the abolition of prostitution. Defeated in 1933, she was director-general of welfare in 1934 and left the Radical Party in 1935. When the civil war broke out she went into exile in Switzerland and died in Lausanne in 1972.
Also known as: Carmen Eulalia Campoamor Rodríguez
Activities and affiliations
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1931–1934
Spanish Republic state institutionsMain
Legislature and state representation -
–1934
Radical Republican Party (Spain)
Legislature and state representation
Related historical events
Women’s suffrage and the divorce law
She was born in Madrid to the seamstress Pilar Rodríguez and Manuel Campoamor, an accountant at a newspaper, and baptised Carmen Eulalia. Losing her father at ten in 1898, she worked as a dressmaker, shop assistant and telephone operator, passed the examination for the telegraph service in 1909 and in 1914 came first in a Ministry of Education competition, becoming a teacher of shorthand and typing in adult women’s schools. In 1925 she became the second woman in the Madrid Bar, a month after Victoria Kent, the first woman to plead before the Supreme Court and the first on the board of the Madrid Ateneo.
In 1931 she was elected to the Constituent Cortes for Madrid for the Radical Party, which proclaimed itself “republican, liberal, secular and democratic”; at the time women could be elected but could not vote. Taking part in drafting the constitution, she faced Victoria Kent of the Radical Socialists, who feared that women would vote for the right, and on 1 October 1931 she won the final debate, Article 36 passing by 161 votes to 121; most of the PSOE voted for it, while her own Radical Party, all but four, voted against. In November she founded the Republican Women’s Union, she was closely involved in drafting the divorce law of 1932, and in the Cortes she argued for the abolition of prostitution as a guarantee of equality between men and women.
Both she and Kent lost their seats in 1933. As director-general of welfare in Lerroux’s Radical government from May 1934 she set up a job exchange and pensions for the blind, but on 23 February 1935 she left the Radical Party over its subordination to the CEDA and the excesses of repression after the Asturias rising. Republican Left refused to admit her, and in May 1936 she published My Mortal Sin: the Women’s Vote and I. When the civil war broke out, fearing the revolutionary violence in the Republican rear, she went into exile in Lausanne, then Buenos Aires, and returned to Lausanne, where she died on 30 April 1972. The Franco regime prosecuted her for freemasonry.